SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10
IMPROVING AND PROTECTING THE NOBEL LEGACY
Today I attended a seminar titled "Can anybody become a Nobel Prize winner?" organized by the Stockholm Academic Forum (an organisation for the Stockholm universities) and the Nobel Foundation.
On my way to the seminar the bus passed by the cemetery where Alfred Nobel lies, and I glimpsed his tombstone in the pale yellow December sunlight. It is a clean obelisk with the upper half slightly raised from the lower half. I remember first seeing it as a kid: In the dark space between the halves there was something. My young imagination immediately conjured up the picture of two clasped skeletal hands hanging out from this stone prison. Of course, it was a thick stone laurel wreath. Today of course the monument was supplied with fresh flowers.
If there is one thing we Swedes are bad at, it is disagreeing. The panel of eminent academics at the seminar generally agreed on everything.
That there are too few female laureates in the sciences (2.4%, counting Marie Curie twice) was unsurprisingly seen as problematic. Anders Bárány, chief of the Nobel Museum, saw it "as a stain not just on society and academia, but also on the Nobel medal." But changing it is complex: There are factors both in society and culture that need to be overcome: in academic organization, in what sciences (and kinds of scientific work) are
seen as important and of course, how the Nobel committees work.
Another issue they also all agreed upon was that it would be OK to give prizes to institutions and research groups, like the Peace Prize sometimes is. There is nothing in particular preventing this in the testament and Nobel Foundation rules (there is a maximum of three parties sharing a prize, but these parties could be institutions). Only the Karolinska Institute assembly (responsible for the medicine prize) has a rule
forbidding it. The panel generally agreed that these days most breakthroughs are not due to individuals but groups. In this world of industrialized science the lone genius is rare. On the other hand, the borders of research groups are often blurred and it might be hard to tell who to include.
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But there may be a conflict here between the function of rewarding useful science and our need for heroes. There is no question that a prize being rewarded mainly to organisations rather than individuals, even when represented by some leader, would have less of an impact than the very personal prizes that are awarded today. As Margareta Norell Bergendahl of the Royal Institute of Technology pointed out, we Swedes might not even realize the status the prizes hold abroad. We need to protect the brand (something the Nobel Foundation is acutely aware of). The laureates are both models to people going into science and public scientists, something all too rare these days.
A surprisingly large number of citizens watch the ceremony and subsequent ball on television. While some just want to see celebrity and royalty, solemn events (surprisingly rare viewing these days) or even the mouth-watering cooking, I think many watch because they feel there is real honour in the air.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8
Future Nobelists of Sweden